The owners who buy that are really donating a few thousand dollars to Tesla without getting anything in return. Its really strange.
A lot of people talk about the "Does it have enough sensors for Full Self Drive?" but my question would also be: Does it have the Compute?
As vehicles get closer and closer to full self drive the compute requirements have shot up, that's because a lot of the building blocks are just adding more machine learning models, pattern recognizers, and a more complete picture of the world. It is all well and good having a dozen sensors, if you can process their input.
A lot of the key cycles cannot be offloaded to The Cloud because of the tolerances (e.g. sub-second query/response for safety). One university project I happen to know of had $20K worth of compute sitting in the trunk. That will obviously come down as it is optimized but a vehicle sold in early 2018 isn't evergreen.
Outright lying is another matter entirely, and in some cases could even be criminal. If I have you on video telling me I can drive the car I'm buying at 90 mph toward a brick wall and the car will prevent a collision, and I then test that statement and die, the video will be used against you in court by my surviving family members.
Only where enforcement is weak. Two years ago, the government of Germany shut down Tesla's "autopilot" advertising for making false claims.
So the software is ready, it's just those damn regulators that are holding it back.
Come on.
The way this is phrased makes it sound like the features are just around the corner, not that the software is years from working, if it's even possible at all.
I know somebody who was told by a Tesla salesman that "Destination Based Autopilot is only months away". The advertising is absolutely deceptive, and I say this as a Tesla owner and fan of the company.